Revolutionize Your Future: The Power of Habit Mastery with Tom Corley

Reading to learn 30 minutes or more a day. I think 88% of the self-made millionaires, my study did that. I read about two, three hours a day now. And practicing your skills, if you're skill-based, because some people, Shahid, they are knowledge-based careers and some have skill-based careers. So if you're a skill-based career, that means you gotta practice. If you're a knowledge-based career, that means you gotta study. And the only way you're going to grow and improve and get better and to almost become like a virtuoso in what you do, which is one of the paths to wealth. There's four paths. Virtuoso is one of them. You're going to get a premium for what you do when you're a virtuoso. Welcome to Super Entrepreneurs Podcast. I'm your host, Shahid Darani. Today we have with us Tom Corley. Tom is a CPA, CFP, holds an MS degree in taxation and is a best-selling author, award-winning author. His books, Rich Habits, Rich Kids, Change Your Habits, Change Your Life, Rich Habits, Poor Habits, Effortless Wealth. Thank you for coming on our show, Tom, and welcome. Thanks, Shahid, for having me on. I appreciate it. My pleasure. I love habits, changed my life, so I'm grateful to have you on here. Thank you. Yeah, that was a good. That title to that book came from Dr. Daniel Amen. I was doing a speaking gig with him in 2014, and I was trying to figure out a name for the book, and he said, I wrote a book called Change Your Brain, Change Your Life. Why don't you say Change Your Habits, Change Your Life? I said, okay, I'll do that. In your experience in the realm of habits, what is that number one habit? You probably get asked this a lot, but what is that number one habit that can generate wealth? It's the growth habits. It's a category of habits, but it's reading to learn 30 minutes or more a day. I think 88% of the self-made millionaires, my study did that. I read about two or three hours a day now, and practicing your skills, if you're skill-based, because some people, Shahid, they are knowledge-based careers, and some have skill-based careers, so if you're a skill-based career, that means you gotta practice. If you're a knowledge-based career, that means you gotta study, and the only way you're going to grow and improve and get better and to almost become like a virtuoso in what you do, which is one of the paths to wealth. There's four paths. Virtuoso's one of them. You're gonna get a premium for what you do when you're a virtuoso, so when I said about writing rich habits, I had never written a book before, so I must've read about six or seven or eight books on how to write, and that took about a year, and I learned a lot about how to write a book, the format, how to build the characters, how to do this, that, and the other thing, and I then started to write, and I felt confident that I could do it because confidence grows with competence and success, but confidence grows with competence, and I became competent in my mind, and I ended up writing Rich Habits and then all sorts of other books after that. Yeah, I think that I would say practicing, if you're a skill-based, reading to learn if you're knowledge-based. I like listening to podcasts. I was listening to audio books for probably five or six years when they used to send them on CDs and I could put them in my car, and I would take notes, which is dangerous while I was driving, but I have something that I do which I think is very helpful to me is I created something called a fact binder. If you can do all this reading, if you're knowledge-based like I am, knowledge-based virtuoso, you have to somehow retain those facts. I can't remember all of those facts, and so I have this fact binder that I created, and in the fact binder, I actually create sort of summaries. I'm just showing you one. This is my rich habits fact summary, and then I have something called my rich habits cheat sheet. I use all of these things, and I have something called the summary of studies that I've done, different studies. So I have all these cheat sheets that I use that help me remember things, and that helps me to become more valuable to those who I serve, and they're willing to pay me money for my value. That's a good point because I was going with that next. You mentioned about reading enough each day, but I find that when you accumulate so much knowledge, you get really top-heavy. You know so much, but we know that results come from the doing part of the knowledge. So the subconscious mind, the subconscious programming that moves the body into action to do those things. So if people are reading, continuously gathering information, but they're not actually doing it because they're not forming that information into a habit, like into an automatic habit in the subconscious mind, is it still beneficial, and what is your point of view on this point that I just made? Yeah, no, I don't believe it is beneficial. I think it's a waste of your time. I think you need to do your reading and build your fact binder if you want doing something like that. Yeah, that's what I liked about the fact binder. Yeah, you build it around your dreams and your goals. I have something that I call dream setting, and Dr. Greg Wells actually gave me the idea for this when I was doing a speaking gig somewhere, and it's a great idea. Basically, what you do is you, if you're like a leaf on a full day, you have no direction in your life, and you're just not sure what you wanna do, sit down and, you know, it's a fun exercise, sit down and write about a thousand-word script. What your ideal future life looks like, let's say 10 years out, so you're 10 years older, and now you're writing in your journal. I want you to write in that journal, I want you to describe your amazing, ideal, perfect life, because you're not gonna write about a shitty life, right? You're gonna write about a life that you want, that you're pursuing, that you would love to have, not that you're pursuing, but that you would love to have, and so you write about this amazing, ideal life, so that's part one of this script. Part two is then, tell me how you got there. So in your journal, you're saying, this is my life, I have this beautiful house down by the shore, I make X amount of dollars, I have this much wealth, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then the next part is, okay, how did I get here? This is what I did, and then you map it all out, and you create a blueprint for how you got from point A to point B, being 10 years into the future, and I must have, I enjoy doing these dream-setting scripts so much, I must have about 200 of them. If I'm feeling down, Shahid, what I'll do is, I'll say, I'm gonna write a dream-setting script today, and I will write a dream-setting script, and it will get me all pumped up, and it'll get me all motivated, and then next thing I know, I'm doing my reading, I'm doing my studying, I'm looking at this, and I'm looking at that, and then I'm doing more writing, and maybe it even stimulates me to write another book, or do whatever, but that dream-setting script really is the catalyst, because built into that dream-setting script are all your dreams that you have realized in life. Now, dreams, if you think of a dream as a rung on a ladder, right? You have a ladder, it's your ladder, and you put it on your wall. Each one of those rungs is a dream. In order to get to the life of your dreams, you have to climb all those rungs, and get to the top. You have to realize all of those dreams, and every dream, each dream that's in your dream-setting script, actually, in order to be realized, you have to accomplish certain goals, action goals. Goals are not some ethereal number. They're not some distant place. Goals are physical activities that you take. People mistake dreams and goals. Dreams are that objective, that I wanna be living in a home down by the ocean. That's a dream. A goal is, okay, how am I gonna get that house by the ocean? What do I have to do? And then you say, okay, I'm gonna write a book, or I'm gonna get my CPA, or I'm gonna become a certified financial planner, or I'm gonna become a doctor, or I'm gonna develop this skill or that skill. So now you have this goal of developing this skill, let's say, and what are your goals? Your goals are to practice particular subsets of that skill every day. And in my study, it was the ones who were skill-based virtuosos, they practiced a minimum of three to four hours a day on their skills. So that's how you do it. You build this 10,000 feet high blueprint of what your life is gonna be like 10 years out. Identify all the dreams that are baked into that perfect, ideal future life, and then go after each dream one at a time. Pick a dream and say, okay, I'm going to build goals around that dream. And it's amazing, the brain's amazing, because once you do this dream-setting script, it actually creates a subconscious itch. Your brain just has to scratch. And it will be feeding you with intuition and information. It's whispering in your ear saying, you need to do this, you need to do that. Pardon me. And you're like, wow. I remember when the idea for writing Rich Habits popped into my head. It was in the middle of the night. I said, where the hell did that come from? What is Rich Habits? I don't even know what it was, Shahid. And then my brain was telling me, well, Rich Habits is all the work you've been doing on that study. I was like, oh, it was amazing. The brain's amazing. The subconscious brain can process, the conscious brain can only process 40 bits of information a second. And the subconscious brain can process 40 million bits per second. Far more powerful. So much more powerful. And some people call it the voice. Some people call it a pointer or something. But I find that when we're in a calmer state, we get more of those nudges and pointers and indicators and direction. In your study, when you were researching the wealthy and the not-so-wealthy when it comes to habits, what did you find in regards to calmness of mind? Yeah, so in fact, I found a lot on this, and that's why I started studying brainwaves. Because the aha moments pop into your head typically when you're in the alpha state. When you're going into sleep or coming out of sleep. And so because of that, I kept a piece like a notepad and a pencil by my desk while I was going through all of this research and stuff and learning. And I would write down things that were popping into my head that I had no idea where that information was coming from. So I'd write all these things down. So you have to really, I keep that pad by my desk, by my nightstand, because I find myself writing on it as I'm going into sleep. I'll stop and I'll write on it something that pops into my head. And as I'm coming out of sleep, I'll write on it. Sometimes I write in the middle of the night, and I can't even understand my script. But it's that alpha state, that calm state. Also, you could be in a beta state, which is active state. You could be in a beta state, but typically it's a weird state. It's not exactly beta. When you're exercising, particularly aerobically, you enter a state which I don't think they've actually identified yet. They call it beta, but it's a combination of alpha and beta because your brain shifts from doing a lot of thinking to applying its energy to help you move all the muscles and increase your heart rate and get the blood flowing. So its energy is being redirected physically. So that means the thinking part of the brain is actually in an alpha state. It's calm because it's not being used. And that's when I get a lot of ideas. I remember I was running one time, and I had seven ideas for articles that ended up making its way into one of my books on one run, and after that, I was trying to remember the articles, and after that I said, you know, I'm going to bring my digital recorder with me. A little thing. And so if that ever happened again, and it has happened again, it's the weirdest thing, but you want to be in that alpha state, mental state. That's where ideas and aha moments come from. Everyone talks about success habits, right? People that have success habits. Can you share one or two failure habits that get people to fail or not be so wealthy? Yeah, I think that when it comes to spending money, people, they call it the Diderot effect, and this is where you supersize your life. You increase your standard of living as your income goes up. This is such a common thing for upper middle class people who never really accumulate a lot of wealth, and Dr. Thomas Stanley and his graduate assistant student who helped write the book The Millionaire Next Door did all the research. Anyway, that book really talks a lot about that. You can make a lot of money and not have any wealth, and that's typical upper middle class people because they engage in want spending, supersizing their life, emotional spending. They decide that on the spur of the moment, spontaneously, that they're gonna buy something, and this Diderot effect where, hey, I'm gonna. I felt victim to it. My wife and I moved into our, I finally achieved one of my dreams, realized one of my dreams, which was living down by the ocean, and the house that I bought had an old 80-year-old, you can't really call it a shed because it was a 10 by 20 facility that was used for different things. Anyway, it was in the backyard, and I told my wife, I'm gonna convert that into an Irish pub, and I really enjoyed every single second of converting that into an Irish pub, but the interesting thing, Shahid, the Diderot effect kicked in, so when it was done, my wife was, oh my God, this is amazing what you've done in here, and she said, we have to put pavers around this, so we built a path from the house to the pub. And then we built pavers around the outside of the pub because I built an indoor-outdoor bar. Oh, then we have to have this sliding glass window. Then we have to have a roof that comes overhead. I was like, my God, I said, I am completely self-aware of the Diderot effect, and I am fully victim to it, but it's just the nature, it wasn't that expensive, and we didn't get carried away, but my point is, you need to be aware when you're making these mistakes, and put the brakes on so you stop yourself. One of the things that we're exploring right now is putting in, I don't know if you've ever heard of a splash pool or a dunk pool, but it's a little pool. It's like an eight-by-eight or a 10-by-10. It's very small, and I'm thinking to myself, gosh, if we do this, the Diderot effect is gonna kick in again, and we're gonna be doing this, that, and the other thing. You know, that Diderot effect is very powerful. It's almost too powerful, and the only thing you can do is just avoid spending anything, any of your money, on things that are gonna create more of a need to spend money, so I would say those are the biggest ones, want spending, supersizing your life, the Diderot effect. Keep your, my, keep your house, I was gonna say, but an old friend of mine, this is a CPA. He's 10 years, 11 years older than me. I asked him one time what he thought the secret to financial independence was, and he said, same house, same spouse, same car. He says, if you do that every time you buy a house, you stick in it, you stick with it forever. You buy a car, you stick with it forever until it breaks down, and you stay married. He said, you'll probably retire financially independent. Good point. That was amazing how you achieve a goal, and that got me excited for creating that, buying that home. There's a lot of people that have dreams and have these desires, and they're working each day to achieve it, and you have, so congratulations on that. Thank you, thank you. You're welcome. So habits, many of them can be very deep-rooted. They're genetic, or the environment that they've been in just embedded in them. What do you recommend they could do in the easiest way or the fastest way or the most convenient way for them to change those deep-rooted habits to achieve wealth? Yeah, I'm gonna say this, and people are gonna be like, you know, that's not the answer I was looking for. You can never change the habit synapse. The synapse that was formed to create the habit that you have can never be changed. However, there's a way to trick the brain into co-opting that habit synapse for another habit. Now, one of the things I learned from my research, and I had to do a deep dive into studying the brain and how it works, particularly the habit sections of the brain, the cerebellum, the basal ganglia, and other regions, how do you hack? How do you habit hack? One of the things I found was, it's very interesting, if you just focus on one, what I call, keystone habit, forging one keystone habit, when you successfully forge that habit, and it takes about 100 days, on average it takes about 60 to 100 days to forge a habit. So let's say you forge that habit, a keystone habit. A keystone habit is different from other habits like brushing your teeth, taking a shower. A keystone habit is something that has an impact on other habits, other ordinary habits. So like, deciding that you're unhealthy, you're heavy, and you're unhealthy, and you decide, I wanna lose weight and get healthy, so I'm going to start to walk every day. You baby step it. I always tell people when I'm responding to their emails or their comments in social media, I always tell them, if you wanna start an exercise program, because you wanna lose weight, what you do is, devote only 10 to 15 minutes a day to it. Don't jump in and say, I'm gonna do an hour of walking. That you'll, your brain, in about two weeks, it takes about two weeks, for the brain to say, we're using up too much energy to form this habit, this hour-long walking habit, so the brain will start fighting you, and it starts feeding you with ideas, and it starts feeding you with information that forces you to engage in other habits that they already have in place. So, and you're like, so I can't forge a habit then. The baby step approach, it tricks the brain, because the brain is not gonna say, if you're doing a 10-minute walk, oh, this is too much, requiring too much energy. It's gonna say, oh, we don't care, but what happens when you do that 10-minute walk every day is the habit synapse starts to form, and how a habit actually forms is how a habit synapse comes into being is the neurons move closer together. Neurons are brain cells. They can move in your brain. They can move from one place to the other. They move closer together. Their dendrites and their axons get closer together, and they start communicating more, and then as the habit synapse becomes stronger, that means that the neurons that are creating that habit are growing and becoming bigger, and they're co-opting other neurons to come and help, and then they're getting glial cells to come help them, so now you have all this infrastructure being built over a 10-minute-a-day walk. Guess what? After two months of doing that 10-minute-a-day walk, you say, I'm gonna increase it to 20 minutes. The brain says, we don't care. The habit's already there. We don't care if you do 20 minutes. We don't care if you do an hour. Do five hours. We could care less. The brain won't fight you on it, so baby stepping to forge the habit, but it has to be a keystone habit, and the important thing about keystone habits is they create other complementary habits like eating healthy, and they destroy other contradictory habits like smoking cigarettes, drinking too much beer or wine or whatever. They'll actually destroy, they'll get the glial cells that are forming that habit synapse, that keystone habit synapse, and they'll say, go and kill that other habit synapse that's interfering with us, and they will. The glial cells will go over there and eat them up. It's the little ducks following the mother duck. The actual habit needs to be replaced with a new habit, correct? Yes, yes, a keystone habit. Yeah, so that's very similar to how we work with clients is that we find out what those nonproductive activities are. We replace it with the productive activities, habits that they need to do, but then we emotionalize those habits, so on a consistent basis, emotionalizing on a regular basis, consistently, and we find it to be very successful, because now they're emotionally feeling it. You hit on something that's very important. When you drag emotions into the habit formation process, it's a game changer. I'll give you an example. When iPhones came out, the smartphones came out, all of these apps started popping up. The latest app that everybody is now using is TikTok. Because these apps target the emotional centers of the brain, the habit is instantaneous. The energy resources that get freed up when you tap into the emotional center of the brain is enormous, and so you can forge an immediate habit if it's emotion-based. So you hit onto a very important point. The problem is a lot of these habits are not emotion-based. Oh, I'm gonna save 20% of my income. How do you get excited about that? The way you get excited about it is when you consistently invest it, and then that investment grows, and then all of a sudden you get emotional about every time you save, because now you see your wealth growing. Very good, Tom. It was great talking to you, my friend. Learning about this changed my life. The habits that I have now, I wish I had them earlier. Targeted habits that I emotionalize followed my mentor's instructions. That's how he did it. Like you said, it wasn't immediate. It took some time, but they feel like they were part of you forever. It just feels like it's part of you, like in your cells when you emotionalize. Appreciate you, Tom. Appreciate you taking the time to come on our show to talk about this. Looking forward to seeing your new book. If you have anything to launch or promote, let us know. You can come back on. Okay, thanks, Shahid. I appreciate it. My pleasure. Bye.